Determining the size and specific demographics of a television viewing audience helps television content providers and distributors schedule television programming and determine a price for advertising during the programming. In addition, accurate estimates of television viewing demographics enable advertisers to target certain types and sizes of audiences. To collect these demographics, an audience measurement company enlists a plurality of television viewers to cooperate in an audience measurement study for a predefined length of time. The viewing habits and demographic data associated with these enlisted viewers is collected and used to statistically determine the size and demographics of a television viewing audience. In some examples, automatic measurement systems may be supplemented with survey information recorded manually by the viewing audience members.
The process of enlisting and retaining participants for purposes of audience measurement may be a difficult and costly aspect of the audience measurement process. For example, participants are typically carefully selected and screened for particular characteristics so that the population of participants is representative of the overall viewing population. Additionally, the participants are required to perform specific tasks that enable the collection of the data, such as, for example, periodically self-identifying while viewing television programming.